


Keeping Score

by Stealth_Noodle



Category: Final Fantasy II
Genre: Comment Fic, F/F, Final Fantasy Kiss Battle, Fingerfucking, First Time, Mid-Canon, Porn, Video Game Mechanics, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-02
Updated: 2013-03-02
Packaged: 2017-12-04 02:22:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/705418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stealth_Noodle/pseuds/Stealth_Noodle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maria decides that the best way to puzzle through her attraction to Leila is to act on it. (And one big joke about the leveling system somehow turns into porn.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keeping Score

The first time Maria found herself pressed up against Leila, so close she was sure Leila could feel the heat of her blush, she didn't think much of it. The waves were rough, her stomach lurched out of sync with the sea, and she'd already tripped twice into Firion. When she apologized, Leila only laughed and offered her grog as "the quickest way to get yer sea legs." 

Maria vomited most of it over the side of the ship and couldn't believe she'd taken medical advice from a pirate.

* * *

The second time was on solid ground, with fully functional legs. While exploring the desolation of Deist, Maria wandered so deep into her own thoughts—of lives senselessly snuffed out, of beautiful things ruined beyond hope of repair—that she failed to notice Leila had halted just ahead of her at the top of the stairway. They toppled forward together, Leila catching herself on her palms and Maria catching herself against Leila's back. 

When Maria tried to get up, the clasp at her throat snagged on Leila's necklace. Efforts to separate tended toward strangulation on one end and indecent exposure on the other, with shouting in between.

"Just take yer bloody top off," Leila said, supporting herself with one arm and swatting over her shoulder with the other. "Not a one here who'd object to seein' what's beneath."

The rush of heat to Maria's face foiled a delicate detangling operation. " _I'd_ mind!"

Firion cleared his throat. "So I'd offer to help, but I think Leila's solution is really better for every—"

"Get over here," Maria snapped.

And afterward she couldn't stop blushing, couldn't keep out the intrusive memory of Leila's bare skin. It was a less depressing distraction than any that had been haunting her since the fall of Fynn, but still a troubling one. No one whose moral compass spun so freely had any right to magnetism.

* * *

The third time Maria had to take some responsibility for. The bittersweet jubilation of retaking Fynn whirled and twisted inside long her after the battle ended, long after she'd stared down the empty streets, bloody ax still in hand, and talked herself out of going home. Brooding in the burnt husk of a house would help no one.

So she celebrated instead in the camp, talking circles with Firion around the knotted feelings too complex to pick apart. About everything but family, everything but Fynn. She teased him, gently, about the Lamia Queen, and he feigned dramatic aggrievement.

"Listen," he said, over-enunciating against the effects of his current drink, "she would've tricked anybody. Perfect Hilda disguise. Would've tricked _anybody_."

"Not Guy," Maria replied. She held his name out too long, as if that made up for earlier slurring. "Guy would've smelled her out." Or maybe he just wasn't broken the same way they were, bent toward monsters and career criminals.

Guy shook his head. "Smell flowers."

"Aye, the beast was clever enough for perfume," said Leila, whose approach Maria hadn't noticed. She squatted on her heels, not quite settling into the circle. "Still had a mean set of fangs, though. Ye try peekin' north of her tits?"

"They looked like Hilda's at the time," Firion replied. "So no."

Leila laughed and clapped him hard on the back. Her balance already seemed a little precarious, so Maria reached over helpfully to steady her. Strange that any part of her felt soft.

"Got a pair of wanderin' hands on ye, lass," Leila said lightly.

The angle of support had not been well planned. Maria let go as if she'd grabbed embers and stammered her way through an apology. Firion tipped over laughing.

"Maria red," Guy remarked. Sometimes Maria wished that he only spoke beaver.

* * *

After the fourth time, when Maria managed to bump hip-first into Leila while holding the crystal rod at the most obscene angle possible, she gave up hoping that whatever drew her toward Leila would fade away on its own. Leila wasn't a monster, after all. Crass, lawless, and as amoral as a cat, but only a paling gray against the greater darkness. It took so much more now to leave Maria appalled.

"You know," Firion told her on the way to the Mysidian Tower, "every time you feel up Leila, you get better at it."

Maria eyed him balefully. "It's not—I'm not _trying_ to." She waited until he'd taken a sip of his grog to add, "I think I'm going to have to make out with her."

Firion sprayed grog through his nose. When his coughing subsided, he said, "You're going to have to walk me through your logic."

"Aye," said Leila, who Maria hadn't realized was in earshot and who sounded entirely too amused, "let's hear it."

Mercifully, a sea monster attacked.

* * *

She danced with Firion twice and drank three glasses of wine to muster the courage to walk over to Leila, who didn't seem to have much use for royal extravagance and had settled into a dark corner with her flask. Everyone celebrated and mourned in their own way, Maria supposed. She was just drunk enough to feel profound.

Leila nodded an acknowledgment and held out her flask. Against her better judgment, Maria took a sip and managed, with some difficulty, to swallow what felt like a mouthful of fiery nails. No wonder Leila thought grog was a gentle, stomach-settling drink.

As she coughed, Leila thumped her on the back. "Bit of an acquired taste, that. Come to get yer fix of gropin' me?"

"No. Actually, yes." Maria coughed again, cheeks blazing at a temperature she couldn't blame entirely on the alcohol. Focusing on Leila's face flustered her, so she let her gaze drift down to rest in the valley of cleavage. "It really hasn't been on purpose, but it keeps happening, so I must..." The words wouldn't come out, so she fumbled for different ones: "Maybe it's fate. Destiny wants us to kiss."

"Does she, now?" Leila's finger tipped her chin up. "Pretty sure 'destiny' is just yer libido."

Or possibly her inner ear. "Either way, do you mind?"

Leila laughed. "Didn't ask Firion for much help with yer lines, did ye?"

Maria huffed, but in the next moment Leila had pulled her in and pressed their mouths together. For a few exhilarating seconds, she let herself be overwhelmed; then it occurred to her that Leila's lips were capturing and tugging and Leila's tongue was tracing and probing, so she probably ought to be doing something with her own mouth other than letting it hang slightly open.

Leila flicked her tongue one last time over Maria's lower lip before pulling back and saying, "You're no good at it, lass."

"I just need practice! A few weeks ago, I couldn't swing an ax very well, either."

The skeptical angle of Leila's eyebrow suggested that these skills did not have much in common, but she shrugged and said, "Let's see how quick ye learn, then."

This time Maria focused past the tingling in her skin and heat rushing below it, tried to match and react. Kissing was a bit like dancing, she thought. Blind, slippery dancing. If she let herself be lost in it, her clamoring thoughts couldn't follow.

She fell out of rhythm with a startled noise as Leila's hand slid into her bodysuit to cup her breast. Leila withdrew, laughing, and said, "I'll rate ye two out of sixteen."

Breathing hard, Maria squared her shoulders. "I won't settle for less than a nine."

"Wouldn't have pegged ye for the sort to go past three in public."

Alarmed, Maria turned to see if the shadowed corner had attracted an audience, but everyone's attention was focused on the bleeding soldier who'd just staggered in.

* * *

It wasn't just that Leon kept his distance, his face as shielded as if he'd never raised his visor and his voice as cold as if they'd never been children together. It was that Firion and Guy kept looking at her as if she could fix it. That was what she'd always done, every time Leon stormed away from home or shouted politics against their parents until they were all hoarse. She'd save her voice and cast it like a spell into the rain and the dark: _Come home._

For years it had been enough. In the cellar of her heart, in the place where she buried all her grief for the dead, Maria feared that this time it wouldn't be. Dwelling on this left her sick and angry that he could still hurt her more than a thousand greater tragedies; she needed badly not to think.

She found Leila on top of one of Fynn's towers, hair blowing free in the wind and flask gleaming orange in the sunset. Leila gave her a nod of acknowledgment, an appreciative leer, and an offer of teeth-melting alcohol. Maria declined the flask and leaned against the wall beside her.

"That yer lost boy ye brought back?" Leila asked.

Maria folded her arms. "I don't want to talk about him."

"Neither do I." Leila took a swig that made Maria's throat ache in sympathy. "As I hear it, ye lot mean to go sailin' into Hell."

Put that way, it sounded even more reckless than riding a wyvern into a cyclone. "It's the only way to stop the Emperor."

"Well, don't take me ship to do it." Leila drank, frowned, and shook her empty flask upside-down over the stones. "Shit," she said, after a long enough pause that Maria was fairly certain it wasn't in reference to the end of the booze. "Never been on this end of leavin' a fine piece of ass behind to go runnin' down the line 'twixt brave and stupid."

It didn't sound like she was fishing for an invitation to come along, and she'd always been markedly more enthusiastic about fighting in the open air than underground. Maria inclined her head and asked, "Are you worried about me?"

"Ha! If Leviathan couldn't hold ye, nor can Hell itself." Leila turned her face away for a moment, then arched languidly away from the wall and set one arm akimbo. "Now, did ye really come up here just for a spot of conversation? Or were ye hopin' for a quick fuck?"

Maria failed to suppress a blush. "I wasn't going to put it that way."

"Ye were takin' yer sweet time puttin' it any other way." Leila grinned, long and sly. "Had it all laid it out in yer head, didn't ye? How ye can't go to Hell afore ye let anyone in yer knickers?"

"That's not what the inside of my head sounds like. And what makes you so sure I've never done so?"

"I kissed ye." 

Maria laughed in spite of herself, on a long breath that drew some of the tension out of her shoulders. "Show me how."

Leila set a hand on the wall over Maria's shoulder, silhouetting herself against the reddening sun, all scent and heat. "No doubt ye'll take right to it," she drawled, "seein' as it's yer destiny."

"Don't make fun of me," Maria said before pulling her closer.

Kissing felt near enough to familiar now, and she didn't jerk away when Leila's hand curled around her breast. She wasn't sure what to do with her own hands—not let them hang awkwardly, certainly, though she couldn't find a part of Leila that seemed like the right place to set them—but stopped worrying when Leila's callused thumb rubbed circles around her nipple. Heat curled through her, down from her mouth and chest and up from the soles of her feet. Her back pressed into the stone wall.

Maria found a purpose for her hands in undoing the clasp of her bodysuit.

"Eager little thing," Leila murmured against her cheek. Her lips trailed down to Maria's throat, leaving Maria's mouth free to pant as rough hands peeled the fabric down past her hips. Against the impulse to cover herself, Maria tugged at Leila's clothing.

One of Leila's hands stopped sliding against Maria's skin long enough to reach back and undo whatever it was keeping her top on. Maria caught the cloth, discarded it, and let her hands explore. It was strange to hold another woman's breasts, to compare weight and roundness before realizing none of that mattered as much as the way the nipples stiffened between her fingers. A pleased hum rose in Leila's throat; encouraged, Maria pinched.

"That's the way, lass. No such thing as a delicate pirate." Leila nuzzled up the side of her neck to nip her ear. "But don't fret; I'll be gentle with ye."

"Don't you dare. I'm every bit as tough as—" was as far as Maria got before Leila caught a handful of her hair, yanked her head back, and kissed her with bruising force. Maria dug her fingers into Leila's back. She'd almost wrested some control back over what was happening in her mouth when Leila's other hand cupped the throbbing heat between her thighs and ran a fingertip between the slick folds.

Leila broke the kiss, disheveled and grinning. "Don't mind a bit of rough, do ye?" Her finger traced and teased, never quite slipping inside, and Maria's hips rolled against it.

Maria tightened her grip, let her nails press in. "Don't tease."

The finger slid home, and she clenched around it, breath hitching. Leila's thumb circled her sensitive nub; with each pass she unfolded, until what had felt thick became far too small to satisfy. She ground against Leila's knuckles, seeking more. 

"Yer cunt's soppin' wet." Leila slipped in a second finger: too much, then not enough. Her wrist twisted back and forth until Maria screwed her eyes shut and watched stars gather on the backs of her eyelids. "Wish ye could take me whole fist, don't ye?"

Maria's eyes fluttered open as a third finger stretched her just shy of discomfort. "That's—wouldn't fit," she panted. The slow crooking of Leila's fingers closed her eyes again and left her without words for the lilting response of, "Oh, ye'd be surprised."

The shifting of every knuckle, the heat of Leila's breath on her cheek, the hand curved tight over her hip—all of it knotted up inside Maria, strung her insides taut. She parted her thighs as wide as the fabric bunched around her legs allowed. Leila's fingers moved nothing like her own ever had: strong, sure, deep, twisting and curling into places Maria had never known craved touch. The steady pressure of Leila's thumb above made her knees shake. 

"Come for me, lass." Leila nipped at her mouth, coaxed out her moan. "Let me hear you."

She wasn't loud—hadn't ever been, sharing a room in a small house with two boys—but she let a whine build and break on her ragged breaths. Release arched up through her and echoed out in throbs. Her grip on Leila slackened. When she opened her eyes, she found Leila watching her intently, cheeks flushed and pupils wide, lips parted. 

"There's yer gold standard," Leila said, voice too husky to be blithe. She slid her fingers free, leaving behind the dull jolts of aftershocks, and held her glistening hand in front of Maria's face. "Now let's see what ye—"

Maria caught her wrist and sucked the wetness from one of her fingers. 

"Ah, ye minx!" Leila laughed breathily. "The tricks I'd teach ye..."

She wanted to spend the night up here, let the twilight fade and the moon rise, let the stars wink out and the horizon glow pale again, but even an hour was a precious thing to steal. She reached her free hand under Leila's skirt and tugged damp fabric out of her way.

The angle felt backward. So strange to brush her fingers over coarse curls without also feeling the tickle, so strange to trace the shapes of folds at once familiar and alien. Touching herself was simple; touching Leila was like dowsing, and she wasn't sure how to interpret every subtle twitch.

Leila's hand folded over hers. "Here, lass, like this. Ye feel that?"

Maria rolled her fingertips until she was certain of the distinction. "Yes."

"Press hard as ye like there. And here, ye feel? Steady now, and hook yer fingers in. Aye, aye."

Leila's hips rolled, back and forth and around. Maria felt for every subtle shift in texture, watched for every change in Leila's face, and fell in with their rhythm. If she wasn't giving as good as she'd got, at least she was solidly contributing. A red flush spread over Leila's chest, just visible in the low light; Maria hooked her arm around Leila's back and pulled her close to feel its heat. Their breasts rubbed together, slick with sweat.

Thighs trembling, Leila buried her face in Maria's shoulder. With a soft grunt, she clenched around Maria's fingers, and Maria kept her hand moving, slowly, easing her down.

Leila was still breathing hard when she raised her chin and kissed Maria, slow and deep. She parted on a laugh, saying, "Next time we'll get our boots off. Get ye on yer back."

Maria rubbed her hands together, for want of anywhere to wipe them. "Didn't you say something about your entire hand?"

"Oh, aye. Teach ye to kiss a little lower, too." Leila winked before stooping to retrieve her top. "For now, best get back to yer boys. Take a bath first, unless ye fancy Guy smellin' ye out."

Things were already awkward enough with Leon. "I should hurry, then," Maria said reluctantly, pulling her bodysuit back up. Here was the world pressing back in, but at least she'd had a few moments' freedom. "Firion's probably already looking for me. I'll—" something caught in her throat— "I'll be back."

"That ye will. I'll see to it nothin' slips past ye out of Hell and comes after Fynn." A pale gray indeed, against that dark.

Everything else Maria had to say was too much or not enough, so she only nodded and turned to leave. She had one foot on the stairs when Leila called after her, "Four out of sixteen."

Maria stopped to cast a challenging look over her shoulder. "Just you wait until I get back."

"Aye, that'd be the idea."


End file.
